A Cowboy Christmas Miracle (Burnt Boot, Texas Book 4)

by Carolyn Brown

  “The decorations are all stored down in the bunkhouse,” Lottie was saying when Betsy finally turned off the vision of Declan in all his naked splendor with her body next to his and started listening again, “so I suppose I can trust you two to go together down there and load them in the truck and bring them up to the house. I store them in the closet, and that’s all there is in it, so it won’t be hard to locate. And you know the rules. Any hanky-panky goes on, and I’ll sell this place to one of the O’Donnell cousins. I hear that there’s another one coming up here to spend Christmas with Sawyer and Jill and maybe get hired on over at Fiddle Creek. I swear to God on the Good Book that them O’Donnells are going to take Burnt Boot plumb over. I bet you could kick any mesquite bush between here and Galveston and a dozen O’Donnells would come runnin’ out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Declan smiled.

  His foot made its way from her ankle up the outside of her thigh, and she shivered.

  “Is it too cold in here, Betsy? Leland liked it cool. Said that breathing hot air wasn’t good for a body, and I was in the kitchen with the oven on half the time, so I was plenty warm, but if it’s too cold, I could throw another log on the fire or jack up the central heat a little. Don’t like to use it no more than I have to since it is more expensive than burning logs.”

  Betsy reached over and patted Lottie’s veined hand. “I’m just fine. A goose walked over my grave and made me shiver.”

  Lottie’s eyes sparkled. “Leland used to say that. Declan, you’d best have another helping of biscuits and gravy.”

  “It’s a fine breakfast, Miz Lottie, but I couldn’t hold another bite. I have to save room for breakfast dessert.”

  “Well, fizzle! I nearly forgot that the cinnamon rolls were in the oven.” Lottie jumped up and grabbed a hot pad on her way to the stove.

  “Lottie said an F word,” Declan whispered.

  “She did not,” Betsy argued.

  “She said fizzle and that is creative cussin’. Are you going to tell her?”

  Betsy shook her head. “No, sir. It might be a test, and I’m not sayin’ a word if she yells the F bomb in the middle of church on Sunday morning. I’m not losing a single point.”

  “And here they are, fresh from the oven. If we don’t eat them all right now, we’ll take a break about ten o’clock and have a snack with a cup of coffee. Betsy, you can serve us up one each while I refill coffee cups. My Leland’s favorite breakfast dessert was cinnamon rolls, and we always had them the day we decorated the house for Christmas. So, sweetheart”—she looked up at the ceiling—“I’m thinkin’ of you today. Don’t walk up to them pearly gates too fast. I’ll be along to join you before long, and we’ll talk to Saint Peter together.”

  Betsy’s eyes misted, but she kept the tears at bay. That’s what she wanted, after she bought the ranch—a love that endured on past this life and into eternity.

  “These are delicious,” Declan said.

  “Leland thought so. I usually make up a little pan full and put them in the fridge when I make hot rolls for supper. That way they’re ready to pop in the oven the next morning while we’re having breakfast and we can eat them hot. We was married fifty-four years, and even after a year of being without him, I really miss my Leland,” she said wistfully. “But like I said, it’s good that y’all are here the last two weeks of my time in Burnt Boot.”

  “I want what you and your Leland had—a love that lasts years with a woman I can work with on this ranch,” Declan said.

  “Well, honey, it takes two to make what we had. I hope you find it,” she said.

  * * *

  The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the fast-falling snow, so Declan drove the old truck slowly down to the bunkhouse. A patchwork quilt covered the bench seat, because the original fabric was worn and had holes in it. The heater worked half speed at best, and not at all on such a short distance. The headliner had long since been ripped away, leaving bare metal showing, and the radio hadn’t worked in years. But the engine purred away like a kitten.

  “Reckon we could call in both families and they’d come help us like they did at the bar when we decorated?” he asked Betsy.

  “I doubt it very much. Anyone who sets foot on the Double L would have a hell of a time explaining it to our grandmothers,” she answered. “Speaking of that, if you get the ranch, are you renaming it?”

  “I haven’t decided. How about you?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. It’s been the Double L for more than fifty years. Be a shame to change it.”

  He backed the truck up as close to the bunkhouse porch as he could get it, and they both bailed out at the same time. By the time she reached the door, he had opened it and was standing to one side.

  “Welcome, darlin’, to my humble abode. It’s not the mansion at River Bend, but there’s no one in here that will shoot you on the spot.”

  She stopped right inside the door and stomped the snow off her boots, onto the inside doormat. He came in behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his cold face in her hair.

  “You smell like warm coconut and cold snow,” he whispered.

  She whipped around and pressed her body close to his. “Kiss me, cowboy.”

  He kicked the door shut with his boot heel right after two puppies raced inside, shook the snow from their fur, and headed straight for the rug in front of the fireplace. He didn’t notice or care what the dogs did. He’d wanted to kiss her since she’d walked into the kitchen that morning with sleep still in her eyes.

  Her lips tasted sweet, like cinnamon with a hint of coffee, and he could have stood there forever kissing her and feeling her body next to his, but she pulled away.

  “I do believe that was hanky-panky, and you can bet your sweet, sexy ass that Lottie looked at the clock when we left. I bet if we’re not back in twenty minutes, she will blast through that door to see what we’re doing,” Betsy said.

  “I looked that up in the dictionary.” He followed her to the closet and groaned.

  “What?”

  “Hanky-panky. I looked it up in the dictionary.”

  “And what did it say in there? I believe I have a damn good idea, but give it to me in technical terms. Holy smoke, Declan, there is a pickup load of decorations here. She must have the house like that one in the movie I saw when I was a kid.”

  “The Griswolds’ house?”

  “That’s the one, and tell me the definition.”

  “According to the dictionary it is”—he pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read—“hanky-panky is ‘frivolous and slightly indecent sexual activity.’ Kissing is not a sexual activity so we haven’t broken a rule.”

  “Today.” She giggled. “Can’t testify about yesterday, but so far today, we’ve not indulged in hanky-panky.”

  “And by the time we get all this up in the house and on the house, we’ll be too tired,” he said.

  “Speak for yourself,” she said. “But wait, you have a poker game tonight, after we do all this.”

  “I’d forgotten. I’ll try to get out of the game before midnight if you’ll be waiting on me right there on that bed.” He pointed through a door into his bedroom.

  “At which time rules, like piecrust, will be broken?” She picked up the top box and headed outside.

  “I certainly hope so,” Declan said.

  * * *

  The boxes were unloaded in the kitchen, and Lottie danced around giving orders. The first thing they were going to do was put up the tree, and from the weather report Lottie’d gotten on the radio while they were gone, the snow was supposed to let up right at noon. So the inside of the house would be first, and then Betsy and Declan could take care of the outside decorations.

  “Oh, it’s going to be lovely for our last year here, Leland. I hope you are looking down from heaven
and liking everything we’re doing. Oh, we need Christmas music,” she said.

  She opened the top of an old stereo system with a turntable and removed a stack of vinyl records from behind a door on one side. “We’ll each choose one. These were mine and Leland’s favorites.”

  It was no surprise that they were all country music, all older artists, and that most of them had several artists on one record. When they’d all picked one, Lottie put them on the turntable and music filled the small house. More than a little bit scratchy and a lot of twangy guitar and whining fiddles, it made Betsy think of the old holiday movies she liked to watch every year.

  Declan removed the artificial tree from the box held together with both masking and duct tape. “Looks like this has been around for a while.”

  “Forty years. Them first years we went out in the woods and cut a tree, and every year my Leland would take sick during the holidays. Took me a while to figure out it wasn’t the weather but that damned cedar tree, so I saved up my egg money all year and bought that one, and he didn’t get sick no more. Y’all might do well to remember this, whichever one of you gets the place, that there is a little part of the land in the back forty corner that I have to fight the cedar on. I keep them brush hogged off every spring, but if you don’t take care of them, they’ll take over the place.”

  “I’ll remember. We had to fight those damned things at Wild Horse more than the mesquite,” Betsy said.

  Lottie shook her finger at Betsy. “One more cuss word and the contest won’t be tied no more. This is your warning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Betsy said.

  Lottie declared that the tree had to sit in front of the big window overlooking the front lawn. “That way, it can be seen when folks drive down the lane, while they’re out lookin’ at the lights. Me and my Leland, we got a big kick out of driving around and seein’ what everybody else was fixin’ up for the holidays.”

  The house phone rang and she threw up her palms. “Y’all go on and get it all fixed and ready while I answer this. I hope that it’s not Verdie. She’ll keep me talking for hours. That woman talks more than anyone I ever knew.”

  Betsy rolled her eyes toward Declan, who stifled a chuckle and handed Betsy an armload of artificial tree limbs to stick into the metal tree trunk he’d set up.

  “I think these go in the bottom, since they are longer. I’ll do the top ones,” he said.

  Lottie was in the kitchen on a corded wall phone, out of sight, so when Betsy bent over to put the very bottom limbs on the tree, his hand cupped her bottom and gave it a gentle squeeze. She jumped like she’d been shot and glanced in the direction of Lottie’s voice.

  Declan’s arms went around her, and he kissed her long, hard, and passionately. She forgot where she was, what she was doing, and the stakes if they got caught in Lottie’s living room, for God’s sake, and clung to him after the kiss ended. Then reality hit, and she took a step back, stumbled over the coffee table, and fell backward onto the sofa.

  “Are you crazy?” she whispered.

  “Couldn’t resist, and besides, she can’t see through walls. So are you inviting me to make out with you on that big, old, soft sofa?”

  “Hell no! And if you tell on me for cussin’, I’ll file sexual harassment charges on you with Lottie for touching my butt,” she teased. “And we’d best have that tree ready for decorations before she gets back.”

  He extended a hand and pulled up her to a standing position, tipped up her chin, looked deeply into her eyes, and kissed her on the tip of the nose. “This is the ugliest tree I’ve ever seen. The only hope it has is if we completely cover it up with decorations.”

  She giggled. “By what I’m seeing over there in those boxes, that is totally possible.”

  They had it looking as good as possible when Lottie joined them again. “It was Verdie, and she had to know what all was going on over here. I told her about the barn and the decorating today, and she told me that she’s having a hard time keeping Callie on bed rest. Lord, you’d think that was her blood grandbaby the way she goes on about it. And those other kids have flat-out put some new giddyup in her step. Me and Leland wanted kids but the good Lord didn’t see fit to bless us, so we just had each other. But Leland said once we taught our Sunday school classes that he was kind of glad that we didn’t have to deal with all the problems that people have with their kids.”

  She stopped for a breath and Betsy pointed at the tree. “What do you think? Is it ready for decorations?”

  “Looks beautiful. You did a fine job of pulling out the branches to make it look all full and pretty. Now we’re ready for the lights. Declan, you can wrap them around your arm and Betsy can fix them on the tree. I still use the big lights. Them little twinkly things never did appeal to me and Leland. We checked them every year before we stored them, so they should be good to go.”

  Betsy spoke up before Lottie went off on another tangent. “Checked them for what?”

  Lottie’s giggle reminded Betsy of a little girl with playground secrets. “If one burns out, then the whole strand won’t light, so you have to check each bulb to see which one is out. But we already did that. Let’s get them on the tree. I’ll sit back here on the sofa and give y’all advice about where they need to be.”

  Every time Betsy unwound a three-foot strand from the roll on Declan’s arms, her hands brushed his. Heat made her think of a hell of a lot more than frivolous sexual activity. It made her yearn for that hotel room again and for pure, old, unadulterated sex with Declan Brennan.

  If her grandmother could have read her mind over at Wild Horse, she would’ve dropped from cardiac arrest right there on the foyer floor. If Mavis Brennan could have read it, Betsy would’ve been a dead woman within twenty-four hours.

  “This ain’t y’all’s first rodeo, is it?” Lottie asked.

  “No, ma’am. We decorated the Burnt Boot Bar and Grill for Rosalie and our job was the tree,” Declan said.

  “You work real good together. Too bad you come from the feuding families or you might make a nice couple. But I don’t suppose you could ever get past that fizzlin’ crap and date each other, could you?”

  “Creative cussin’,” Declan whispered.

  Betsy bit back a grin. “Probably wouldn’t be a healthy idea if we dated each other, would it, Miz Lottie?”

  “And if you did, you’d wind up exiled forever. I was like that when I married Leland. My daddy didn’t like him one bit and my mama wasn’t too fond of him either. They said he’d been one of them kind that sow wild oats on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday to pray for a crop failure. He usually sat in the back pew, and I fell in love with him when I was only fifteen. We ran off and got married when I was sixteen and he was nineteen. Mama said I’d made my bed and I had to sleep in it.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “You got a saggin’ one there, Betsy. Mama was so mad at me that she didn’t let me come home for a whole year. Then she wrote me a letter, even though we both lived right here in Burnt Boot. I wrote her back, and we did that for another year, and then we both got a telephone. She called me one day out of the blue and asked me to come to Sunday dinner. I did, and after a couple of weeks, she called me again and asked me and Leland both to come to Sunday dinner.”

  “Did she ever learn to like Leland?” Betsy asked.

  “I don’t think so, but me and her made up after about five years. We’d go to Sunday dinner once a month, and my mom and I would talk while we washed the dishes, and I guess she finally figured out how happy I was with him, and those last years, things was good. I loved my Leland, so it was worth it waitin’ on her to come around. But a girl needs her mama and a mama needs her daughter, so it was good to be able to talk to her.”

  “Would you have regretted marryin’ Leland if she’d never come around?” Declan asked.

  “Lord no! I loved him with my whole heart. I just had to gi
ve Mama some time to get her thinkin’ all straightened out. You’d be surprised at how much a little patience helps.” Lottie smiled.

  Betsy finished the lights and Declan plugged them in. Sure enough, every one of those big suckers lit up. Red, blue, green, and yellow, they reminded her of one of those silly Ring Pops that kids buy and suck on all day. Would she be willing to never see her mother again until she was on her deathbed if she could have a life with Declan Brennan?

  She mulled that question over as she and Declan wrapped red and green tinsel around the tree, looping it the way Lottie said, in all the right places.

  * * *

  At noon, Lottie served barbecued chicken, fried potatoes, baked beans, and hot biscuits with pecan pie for dessert. The woman was pure magic in the kitchen, cooking a few minutes and coming back to tell them what she wanted done next, disappearing for a bit and returning, and not one thing burned or even scorched.

  According to her, they were going to put the lights around the house that afternoon, and then Lottie would tell them where else they could string up the rest of the lights. From the half-dozen boxes still left of nothing but lights, Betsy figured they’d be able to put them on the barbed-wire fence all the way around the whole ranch.

  “Now I’m going to stay in the house and y’all kids can do the work. When you get it all finished, I will come out and see it. I’ll make a fresh batch of Christmas cookies and some hot chocolate, so you can come in every hour and warm up,” Lottie told them. “There is a plug for the ones around the house up under the eaves at the back of the house, so you want to end there. Me and Leland found out that if you start at the south corner, chances are you’ll come out at the exact right place. We just left the hooks up from one year to the next, so you don’t have to worry with those things.”